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Bureaucracy
Bureaucracy is everywhere, and it sucks. Sure, it is necessary, but it will seriously slow you down. The trick to dealing with bureaucracy is all in the process. Here is the context of my experience in dealing with bureaucracy at WSU, specifically relating to ME416. Our group was sponsored by PACCAR-Kenworth, and we were working with a shipping project. This project required us to work with a large pallet of materials. Specifically, a semi truck sidewall and door, as well as the shipping rack. This pallet, since it is carrying tractor-trailer parts, is rather large. Large to the tune of 6ftx8ftx6ft. As you might be thinking to yourself, where does someone store something of that size? It won't fit through a standard door, nor down a hallway. Obviously, this presented a problem when we tried to find a location to store this pallet while we worked on our project. We needed space where we could access it, but it just so happens that faculty and researchers aren't keen on giving up their limited space to a group of 416 students. This inevitably sent me up the chain of command, consulting every faculty member with control over space large enough from ELB, to TFRB, to ETRL and Dana Hall. With each person I talked to, they sent me to some other person. It seemed the objective was to defer the responsibility. I ended up talking to the assistant to the dean of the VCEA. Then, I ended up in the dean's office for the college of mechanical and materials engineering. We explained our situation to the dean, and he told us he would do some work and look into a space for us to store our project. We said thank you, and went back to working . The next day, we got a call from central receiving, saying they needed the materials out of their warehouse, since the pallet was taking up too much space. So at this point, we opted to take the position of "ask forgiveness rather than permission," and told receiving to drop the pallet off at ETRL. About a month went by, without word from the department. It would seem that the problem of the 416 group storing their materials in the loading dock room of ETRL wasn't such a big problem after all, and we simply slipped through the cracks. So what is the takeaway here? Simple. In some situations, especially with highly bureaucratic organizations such as univerisities or governments, it is prudent to exercise discretion when making decisions and when consulting higher authority. Often times, it can be very beneficial to understand who is on a need to know basis, and who honestly can be left out of a situation. In our case, going through the chain of command and consulting the appropriate parties simply cost us about a week of productivity, and in the end, didn't help us at all. Now, this doesn't mean everything you do can just be done without permission. Obviously, you have to look into each decision carefully, and look into the details. At the end, it is at your discretion which decisions get cleared beforehand and which decisions are made on your authority.